Sling BOX -- Bring your TV to Office ..!

Sling Box That was really a great Idea of seeing your news in your mother language and your channels when you are on the fly anywhere in the world...!

The Slingbox is a compact and elegantly designed, state-of-the-art electronic device that connects to the back of your TV. It redirects, or “placeshifts,” the TV signal from your cable box, satellite receiver, or digital video recorder (DVR) to your computer or laptop of choice, no matter your location — so long as you have a high-speed Internet connection. This utterly unique device will transform the way you watch TV. Whether you want to watch your soaps in the laundry room, or catch the big game during a conference call, or watch your local news from China, the power is now in your hands.

Check out the know how section to learn more on the technology used on this product. It changes the way we watch our television...

Project and Stategies ..!

I was reading some of my subscriptions from Knowledge @ Wharton. I got one of the links on the Startegic Management , where they sighted the reasons for the Failure of the project as below. The core of all the reasons are the process of execution of the project.

1) Movement of our focus from one objective to another over a period of time.
2) Communication of the common goal to everyone clearly.
3) Execution of the plan with the strictness.

Five Key reasons for Getting the work done are :

1)Develop a model for execution.
2)Choose the right metrics
3) Don't forget the plan
4)Assess performance frequently
5)Communicate

Google Code Jam - 2005

Google once again anounces code Jam for the year 2005. Check out the following link for the details. This time Google, I believe Google has increased its prizes to a bigger money.

Google Code Jam - 2005

All the Best...!

Ranjith

Write and Thing clearly with a easy learning..!

I was going thru the presentation on how to write clearly , Think More Clearly and Learn Complex Materials More Easily of Michael A. Covington.


That was a good presentation that runs a pretty long for around 97 slides but it is worth reading. Some of my learnings from it is...

1) Writing , Thinking and Learning are all related and connected.
2) Writing is a very easy job and make sure you follow the following ways that will increase ur presentaion :

a) Plan your Writing - What, how and for whom.
b) Draft What you want to write - First Sketch.
c) Revise after your drafting - Improving it further.
d) Editing - Spelling Grammar and Typos
e) Formatting - Layouts, Colors and Fonts...

Some of the thicker points are :

Reduce the number of words you write to express a thing.
Keep your formating simple and conventional ..!
Write your words keeping the reader of the same in mind and not urself first..!

This is all about Writing...

Will follow up with the Thinking stuffs tomorrow.

Cheers - Ranjith

How to Write Software

Got the following quote from 37 Signals Blog and it was really nice that made me post it here ..!

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” -The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. 1959.

Cheers Ranjith

Buzz Metrics and Blog Readers Types

I was reading through BuzzMetrics blog on Is BLOG going to be an industry term?.

A circulation of Questions on the following manner :

a) Read blogs every day
b) Read blogs occassionally
c) Know what a blog is but dont really read them
d) Have heard of a blog but don't really know what it is
e) Never heard of a blog til right now

And the results were :

1) only 6 % falls in a
2) 13 % answered e
3) 50 % answered c and d


Continuing he says around 2/3 of the people who said that they dont know blogs were reading blogs without knowledge. But Every one here starts at the level of e at the start up and goes forward towards a when we set people and the term blog as X and Y axes. I moved up in the same layer. May be some of the b, c and d may overlap or may be done at the same time. Also people now has started writing blogs like a website and no wonder these things will overlap and 2/3 of people reading blog without knowing what it is ..!

Cheers - Ranjith

cantfindongoogle - A great Idea ..!

That was a great website by Wayne Radinsky. But the site's was there for a long time before it has came out.

I was pretty curious to know what will be his internal search engine which he is going to use for the internal searches as the number of posts on this site is increasing to the order of 30s per day..!

Wayne : Don't you think you need an internal search engine?

Great and Good Efforts Man !!!!

Thanks to Steve for pointing me at Google Doesn't Know it all

Cheers ,
Ranjith

Blogosphere - The Size is growing ..!

I was reading Stever Rubel's post on the blogosphere size where he points to the size of blogoshpere is on the increase and Technorati says it is seeing around 900,000 posts per day.

Rubel also points to the spam blogs and posts. As I read through the post of Sifry , he says that around 80,000 has been created each day.

The ratio of the Number of posts done to the number of blogs created every day is not showing a very good sign of a healthy blogosphere.

One beauty of blog reading is not pushed it is only pulled which can keep us away by ourself from reading such spammers.

Let us wait and see the growth..

Ranjith

Boosting Windows XP Performace

Here is a write up of ten points from a site which has a lot of interesting articles that can help you technically.

I was looking at boosting my Windows performance which landed me here

Some ten tips for XP Performance

Cheers - Ranjith

Recruiters Read ur blog ..!

I got this link from the recriting.com

Are Companies looking at ur blog before they recruit ?

I made a post some times back Are you ready to run in this Era ??? which is a link to Joe Kraus of jotspot and his first question to any guy attending an interview is nothing other than Do you have a Blog.

On seeing both of these things I feel like recruiters down the line will read your blog with or without your knowledge. You may be traced for if you can write a damn good Blog..

Lets wait for the answers ..!

You dont have to click ..!

I had never used a site like this. I was just reading thru seth's blog where I got the following URL:

http://dontclick.it/

The site was so amazing and It really made me think wild on the site..

Great work ..! Great Job ..!

Guys of Dont Click ..!

Are you a PM ?

Check out this post if you are a product manager ..!

That was a great post from Ken Norton of JotSpot on hiring Product Managers...

I dont see much more to write over him. May be I have to read it one more time..

the post

Are you ready to run in this Era ???

Joe Kraus puts three questions to identify the people for a start up company.

1. Do you have a blog?
2. What's your home page? (He prefers people who have created their own home page.)
3. Do you contribute to an open source project?

These questions sounds good for the current era. As everything moving on the web today. It is becoming a mandate to hold these things.

Do you have a blog ? - From the previous world of Word of mouth, it became the word of Blog today... A good blogger has a great relation ships built around him to spark all word of Blog...

Creativity comes from the home page has to accept that. Since It took me a lot of time to customize a very simple page of mine mixing up some of the templates to create my blog page.

Will the whole world of software goes out as a open source ? The answer to this quesiton answers the third question...!

Customizing Blogger ..!

It was a very long time schedule of me to make my page look better in the blogger. I do a couple of more blogs where to I have to sit and do some tinkering work to get it fixed. I am not that much smart in CSS. But I managed a bit and did some work for 4 hours to get this page done. At last I failed to make the bottom margin to 0 Px due to the fact that blogger put a bottom margin on rendering the page at run time. My Quote too is on the fly. I have to decorate the same tooo....

I took some mix up of some of the templates and used some of the images from different templates. Blogger should give some options to upload my own images on to the blogblog.com page of atleast all the images should be visible or listed in this page so that I can crete some of my own templates by myself.

This is some thing I felt on the customisation on the Blogger...

Lets wait for some more customization to be open by bloggerrr...

Cheers - Ranjith

Is Mobile phones a competitor ?

The article on the Tech Beat talks about how you can pay some of your payments using your mobile phones and things will get reflected in your following telephone bill. As a example the article suggests an donation you pay to a charitable institution.

Subscribers simply need to send a short-text message to a 5-digit short code to donate 25 cents a day for 31 days. That donation will appear on their monthly wireless bill.

Also olga suspects or expects mobiles to do some work that a bank supports

In fact, I think it's quite possible that cell phone companies could, eventually, become banks, keeping customer money, helping users pay bills and to pay for purchases. Check out this story, describing the various financial transactions that wireless service providers already enable in other parts of the world.